Racial Attitudes and the Contact Hypothesis

Summary

The American version of the contact hypothesis as it is usually applied to race relations is that the more you get to know blacks, the better you will like them. British and Australian research, however, seems to support the opposite generalization. To propose either a negative or a positive characteristic effect of contact per se does, however, appear almost inevitably simplistic. A random doorstep study of 200 Australians was carried out which compared degree of contact and favorableness of attitude towards a number of community subgroups—working mothers, divorced people, nude sunbathers, and coeducational school attenders—as well as towards blacks. Only in the case of divorcees and nude sunbathers was there any relationship between degree of contact and attitude. Contact as such, therefore, may not have a consistent effect.